


User-defined signals: SIGQUIT, SIGABRT, SIGUSR1, SIGUSR2, SIGTERMĮach signal is represented by an integer value, and the list of signals that are available is comparably long and not consistent between the different UNIX/Linux variants. System signals (hardware and system errors): SIGILL, SIGTRAP, SIGBUS, SIGFPE, SIGKILL, SIGSEGV, SIGXCPU, SIGXFSZ, SIGIOĭevice signals: SIGHUP, SIGINT, SIGPIPE, SIGALRM, SIGCHLD, SIGCONT, SIGSTOP, SIGTTIN, SIGTTOU, SIGURG, SIGWINCH, SIGIO On UNIX-based systems, there are three categories of signals: This module connects the according C headers of your operating system with the Python world. Among other modules, the program code is mainly based on the signal module. In this article we explain what are signals, show you how to sent a signal to another process from the command line as well as processing the received signal. A program that receives a signal either stops or continues the execution of its instructions, terminates either with or without a memory dump, or even simply ignores the signal.Īlthough it is defined in the POSIX standard, the reaction actually depends on how the developer wrote the script and implemented the handling of signals. In short, signals are software interrupts that are sent to the program (or the process) to notify the program of significant events or requests to the program in order to run a special code sequence. One of these mechanisms are signals, and belong to the different methods of communication between processes (Inter Process Communication, abbreviated with IPC).


UNIX/Linux systems offer special mechanisms to communicate between each individual process.
